When you search for a local contractor on Google, some sites are easy for Google to read: the business, its services, its hours and its phone number are spelled out in code. Others leave Google to work it out from the page text. The difference is schema markup.
Schema markup is structured data: code on your website that tells Google exactly what your business is, what services you provide, where you work, your hours, and more. It's like handing Google a cheat sheet about your business instead of making it figure everything out by reading your pages.
What Schema Does for Contractors
Proper schema hands Google your services, business hours, service area, phone number and the questions you answer, in a form it can read without guessing. One thing it won't do is put stars next to your name. The rating beside a business on Google Maps comes from your Google Business Profile reviews, and Google's review snippet guidelines say a business's own pages aren't eligible for star reviews when the business controls the reviews about itself (Search Central, "Review snippet").
It also keeps your facts consistent: the same name, phone number and service area on every page, matching your Business Profile.
Adding LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ and BreadcrumbList schema is one of the simpler technical fixes you can make.
What Schema Can't Do
It doesn't guarantee a special listing. Google says structured data makes a page eligible for a rich result but doesn't guarantee one (Search Central, "General structured data guidelines").
FAQ markup won't get you the FAQ dropdowns in Google any more. Since August 2023, Google shows FAQ rich results only for well-known, authoritative government and health websites (Search Central blog, "Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results"). It's still fine to mark up the FAQs on your page; just don't expect the dropdowns.
And it doesn't rank you by itself. Treat it as getting your facts straight, not as a ranking trick.
How to Check Yours
Some builders and plugins add schema, some don't, and some add it wrong. Don't guess. Paste a page into Google's Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results), or the Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org), and see what's there. Check that the name, phone and service area match your Business Profile exactly.
On the sites I build, schema is built from the business details, so the business, its services, breadcrumbs and any FAQs on the page are marked up the same way on every page. And there's no star-rating markup.
